


Shades.

by VictoryCandescence



Category: Avengers: Age of Ultron - Fandom, Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aromantic, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Love, Sharing a Bed, Truth Serum, mental manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 17:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5215085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoryCandescence/pseuds/VictoryCandescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>Warnings:</b> Mental manipulation, menstruation, mention of past abortion, mention of sterilization, some canon-typical violence.</p><p>A subversion of the relationship showed to us in <i>Avengers: Age of Ultron</i>. I started this fic out with 3 things in mind: 1. I wanted an explanation for why Natasha had seemed to act so out-of-character in regards to Bruce that wasn’t ‘she’s gone dumb with love’; 2. I wanted to rectify the reason for that “monster” conversation and 3. I wanted to establish that Natasha isn’t the only one who can do the lullaby. A little bit of a fix-it, maybe – indulge me. :)</p><p>Accompanying artwork by the incredible <a href="superhumandisasters.tumblr.com">superhumandisasters</a> – and it could not be more perfect.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Shades.

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Mental manipulation, menstruation, mention of past abortion, mention of sterilization, some canon-typical violence.
> 
> A subversion of the relationship showed to us in _Avengers: Age of Ultron_. I started this fic out with 3 things in mind: 1. I wanted an explanation for why Natasha had seemed to act so out-of-character in regards to Bruce that wasn’t ‘she’s gone dumb with love’; 2. I wanted to rectify the reason for that “monster” conversation and 3. I wanted to establish that Natasha isn’t the only one who can do the lullaby. A little bit of a fix-it, maybe – indulge me. :)
> 
> Accompanying artwork by the incredible [superhumandisasters](superhumandisasters.tumblr.com) – and it could not be more perfect.

_ _

 

 _The quotation, "verum et factum convertuntur," translates as "the true and the made are interchangeable". The philosopher Giovanni Vico used this statement to sum up his principle that one can know with certainty only what they have created themself. The ideas of truth and identity as a process where one helps define the other seemed to apply to Natasha's situation._  

 

* * *

 

 

_“Take it,” he says._

_In the dream he is lithe and strong and graceful, even with the limb missing. His hair is just long enough to shade his eyes when he leans forward in a defensive crouch._

_“Take it,” he repeats. “And then give it back twice as hard.”_

_She is learning what to do when she knows she is outmatched. He is teaching her that there is no such thing. She is faster, she is more clever and deadlier, always. Because she has to be. There is no other choice._

_Well. There is one other choice. But it is a choice he has taught her never to accept._

_She charges; his thick fist catches her in the stomach and her breath leaves her all at once –_

Natasha wakes in a gasp for breath, the pain very real. But it doesn’t recede when she evens out her breathing. She sits up and the pain rolls in again like a wave on the shore, breaking in a dull throbbing ache. She flicks on the light and tosses the covers back to find herself sitting in a sizeable patch of dark red blood.

 _This isn’t possible,_ she thinks. _Is it a hemmorhage –?_ But even as she finishes the thought, it sounds wrong.

She reaches for her tablet, pulls up the SHIELD files on her own medical history.

No record of her physicals note that she’s ever underwent tubal ligation or hysterectomy. It tells her she had an IUD for a period of time, but has since switched to an implant, which she just had replaced four months ago. It accounts for her slightly heavier than normal bleeding; it usually takes a few months for the cycles to even out.

Natasha blinks into the brightness of the screen. Like unexpectedly remembering the steps to a long-forgotten routine after hearing the opening bars of a song, she lifts her left arm up and finds the tiny incision where the rod was slipped under her skin.

“Fuck,” she says quietly.

Then she gets up slowly to clean herself and strip the bed.

It’s slow work; her head feels heavy – muddled, full of intrusive thoughts she can’t account for.

 _Do you know what it’s like,_ Clint had once asked. _When they take you out and pour something else in?_

 _You know I do,_ she had answered. She remembers the forgetting, and it should seem ironic, should seem paradoxical, but she knows there are things she was and places she had been and people she knew that have been taken from her, again and again.

She balls up the stained sheets in her fists. Focuses on her breathing.

 _Who do you want me to be?_ she’d asked Steve, and it was the first time she’d wanted an honest answer, the first sincerity since agreeing to go with Clint, trusting that he wouldn’t take her life, and marvelling at the fact that he’d trusted her not to take his.

And she knew Steve would be honest – too honest, painfully honest. It’s his blessing and his curse. _How about a friend?_ he’d asked, and her heart broke a little more. But the last truth she told him (or anyone) was what she’d said in return. He might not have known it, but it’s the one thing that she still believed in and always would: she could never be real, not completely. Not if she wanted to live.

She’s not okay. Isn’t even sure what that would mean. It’s not like she has anything to compare it to.

Her body feels leaden, and though the pain in her abdomen is subsiding, the pain in her head is growing. Her brain feels like a room filling with smoke from an unseen fire.

Something is very wrong.

Natasha staggers to the door and slides it open.

Wanda is crouched on the floor directly across from her. In the dimmed corridor, Natasha can only see the swirl of red light, pulsing and flowing, gripped around her hands and crowning her head.

“Wanda,” Natasha says, getting low and reaching out. “Hey – it’s okay.” She drops to her knees. “Look here. Focus.”  

Wanda tries to lift her head, but her brow is wrinkled in unmistakable pain. Her fingers twitch, knotted up in her long hair. Even in the semi-dark, Natasha can see the dark rings of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Wanda says. “I – I’ve been trying but...I – I can’t –”

Natasha reaches a hand out, tentative, but Wanda throws herself back, skids herself along the floor with her hands flattened on the wall.

Natasha stands again, backs away. She leans in the door of her room and hits the intercom.

“Sam,” she says. “It’s Wanda.” Sam is the only other person besides the Vision that Wanda’s talked to; the only person who can really calm her. Natasha doesn’t blame her; if she read minds she wouldn’t want to be in any one other than Sam’s. He’s far and away the most well-adjusted of all of them here, even though she knows it’s taken him plenty of work to get himself there.

There is a crackle of silence, then his voice: “On my way.”

“N-no. I have to –” Wanda stutters. “I need to fix it.”

“Fix what?”

Wanda reaches out a shaking hand. The light trails from it, toward Natasha’s own head, a haze in her eyes. She can feel it like she can sense an electrical current – there but not in any immediately tangible way. In spite of herself, she shivers.

And here’s the thing – she doesn’t hate her for getting inside her brain, for making the stains of her past bloom up again. She understands, maybe more than anyone (more even than the Vision, who can objectively know everything but can’t understand). She knows what it feels like to be trapped, what you become capable of doing, of believing. And she knows the value of trying to rectify your mistakes.

“Then fix it,” she says to Wanda. “I know you can.”

“I’ll try,” Wanda says. “Please.”

Natasha kneels again. Wanda shifts to face her. She raises her hands, her delicate fingers still twitching and wreathed in that uncanny red light, and lets them hover at Natasha’s temples.

Natasha has figured since their first encounter that Wanda’s powers are more akin to Thor’s lightning (or Bruce’s rage, her thoughts unhelpfully supply): something that is a force of nature too unwieldy to control with any kind of precision. Whether they have always been like that, or are now because of her grief, Natasha can’t rightly say.

“Nat,” comes Sam’s voice. But it sounds muted; they are inside a closed loop together.

As with all things that refuse to be controlled, Natasha can’t anticipate where Wanda goes or what she’s really doing. She balls her own hands into fists, presses her knuckles to the floor. Her eyes are open but she can’t see anything but her memories – a hundred thousand screens all playing at once, everything breaking open, helpless against that red light like rushing floodwater.

“Wanda!” Sam’s voice comes through again, but it’s more forceful now, a little frantic. She feels Wanda jolt, and something fractures inside her – a wire pulled loose while it’s still live –

 _No,_ she thinks. _Wait –_

But then it’s gone. The red light recedes and Natasha blinks hard.

The world comes back into focus, bright and hard-edged. Wanda is slumped against Sam’s legs, unconscious. His hands are on her face, her neck, her wrists, checking her vitals, but his eyes are on Natasha.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “What was she doing?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and it isn’t what she meant to say, but it’s answer enough for both questions. Sam frowns at her.

“I need to clean up and get back to bed,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, echoing in her head. “Take care of her.”

“Nat –” Sam says, concern and confusion at war in his tone. But she waves him off and somehow gets her legs under her enough that she’s able to take the few steps required to get back to her room and lock the door.

 

\---

 

This is a problem, and she knows she’s been avoiding thinking about it in favor of throwing herself into the work of setting up the new Facility, running interference between Stark and Fury and Steve, spending every spare moment she has poring over files from Maria about what Coulson’s been doing. It’s so much to keep straight – who knows which person is living or dead, where they are, what they’re doing – that she’s sealed off her own problems and buried her own secrets.

Maybe this is a wake up call.

Something red flashes in the corner of her eye, but when she looks at the corner of her room, it’s as empty as always.

Maybe it’s a warning.

\---

A couple of hours later, Steve’s voice comes over her com.

“Got a ping, Code Green” he says. Natasha’s stomach clenches. “Looks like your triangulation algorithm worked. Sam says he needs to stay with Wanda. You up to coming?”

“No –” Natasha shakes her head. “I’ll be there in ten.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and she can hear a note of bemusement in his voice. “Hangar 2. Klein’s got the Quinjet running already.”

The coordinates lead them to a foggy, dense forest on a small island in the Babuyan archipelago. The jet the Hulk had let carry him away is nowhere to be found, but there is evidence of a small village near the coastline that Bruce might have taken shelter in. As Natasha brings them in low looking for a clearing to land in, they spot movement through the canopy, and a flash of bright living green among the brown and khaki of the covering foliage.

She brings the jet down and Steve looks at her, expectant.

“Gotta be you,” she tells him. That wasn’t the plan, but his lack of protest tells her he agrees. Steve is tactful enough, though, not to twist that particular knife. “I’ll follow with a gyrocam.”

He holsters his shield over his blue jacket and gives her a nod as he exits.

Steve lopes through the underbrush at a good pace, and comes upon the Hulk in only a few minutes. Natasha swings the camera around and has it attach to a high branch, far enough away that it won’t distract the Hulk, but close enough that she can see if Steve needs assistance.

From what she can see, the Hulk isn’t even attempting to rage about right now. He’s sitting in a shallow pool of water, mashing his fists into the soft moss and growling lowly. There is evidence of a larger tantrum – split trees, smashed boulders, a crater scooped out by huge clawed fingers – but that moment seems to have passed for now. She hopes it stays that way for the time being.

“Hey there big guy,” Steve says. The Hulk tenses, goes still. It’s a good sign; he’s caught the familiar pattern of the words. “The sun’s gettin’ real low.”

He turns to face Steve, and Steve holds out his hand. (Strangely, she’s reminded of the one time she went with him to visit Peggy Carter. It had been a bad day for her, and she’d cried when Steve had walked in the room. But he was wonderful, and she’d calmed as soon as he’d held out his hand. He’d eased her up out of the bed and cradled her in his arms, rocked and spun her slowly around the small bedroom to the tinny sound of music on his phone as he whispered in her ear.

“How many times have you done that?” she asked when they’d left.

“As many times as I’ve needed to,” he answered, and smiled that painful little half-smile that seemed sadder than if he’d burst into tears.)

The Hulk reaches toward him, mirroring the movement. Steve goes through the motions and the huge green hand, streaked with mud and dried emerald-hued blood, skims the air above and below his smaller red-knuckled one.

Finally they touch. The Hulk’s eyes flicker, and he makes an abortive motion to shake the fatigue out of his head, but finally he staggers off a little ways, and slumps to the ground. A few minutes later, Bruce is back, laid out naked on a pile of curling brown moss.

Steve unstraps his shield and rushes over, taking his jacket and shirt off as he goes. He drapes the leather over Bruce’s bottom half, and when he comes to enough to sit up, he hands him the shirt to put on. Natasha can’t help but smile a little while no one else is there to see. Steve is exactly the person you would describe as one who would give you the shirt off his back, and here he’s doing literally just that.

“Steve,” Bruce says, still bleary, his hair its usual mess once he emerges from the neck of the shirt.

“Hey Doc,” Steve says, his smile going a little sheepish.

“Did I –” Bruce starts, but Steve knows and cuts him off.

“No casualties,” he says. Bruce wilts in visible relief. “Pretty sure the closest town doesn’t even know you’re here.”

“But you guys tracked me down easy,” Before Steve can make excuses, Bruce continues, “Though, fair enough. Not like I’m the most inconspicuous thing.”

“We just wanted to make sure you’re safe. It’s not SHIELD, it’s just us. You want to be left alone, just say the word. We’ll take you anywhere else you wanna go, and leave you be.”

Bruce looks around, unsubtle, though Natasha’s sure he won’t spot the camera, at least not without his glasses. “And by ‘we’, you mean you and – Tony?”

“Natasha, actually,” Steve says. The feed is black and white, but if she can’t see the color rise on Steve’s face, she can sure hear it in his voice.

Bruce sighs. He turns his face away, and she can’t see his expression.

“All right. Okay. My sabbatical is just about through here anyhow.” His voice is more wry than defeated, so she elects to take it as a good sign. “Can you take me back to the Tower?”

“Of course.”

Steve helps him to his feet, and Bruce gathers the jacket around himself, zips it up and ties the sleeves around his hips. The Quinjet is only a mile or so away from their position, so Natasha detaches the camera and flies it back before they arrive.

\---

Natasha was prepared to face an entire flight’s worth of awkwardness, or even open hostility. But as soon as they boarded, Bruce dropped down on the nearest bunk and was out like a light. Hardly even looked at her. She isn’t sure if she feels more relieved or hurt. Ashamed, maybe; it accounts for both. Steve leaves a pair of clean black scrubs, an MRE and a bottle of water at the foot of his bed for when he wakes, and joins Natasha in the cockpit.

“They got no more shirts back there for you?” she asks. Still in only his undershirt, Natasha can see out of the corner of her eye that even his chest blushes. He keeps his eyes fixed out the windshield – which is why when he deadpans, “You complainin’ about the view?” she actually snorts out loud.

“Not at all,” she says, drawling. Steve’s having a hard time not smiling now. He’s doing that thing where he slumps in on himself, all round shoulders and bended spine. Still not used to compliments about his appearance, even in jest.

“So,” says Steve after a while. “You and Bruce.”

Natasha sighs. Had to bring it up sooner or later.

“Me and Bruce,” she says, giving permission. She looks over; Steve is looking back, grim. All the levity they’d tried to pad up between them is gone, and Natasha feels all the uncomfortable edges come right back.

“How much of it was a lie?” he asks.

Her mouth feels dry.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” she says.

“Give it a shot, we got all night.” There’s a petty kind of disgust in his tone that Natasha hates hearing, especially when it’s directed at her. She hasn’t been the target of it in a long time, but she supposes from his point of view right now, she kind of deserves it. She spends a few moments silent, choosing her words carefully.

What she intends to say is that she does care for him. It’s imperative that she stay on Steve’s good side right now. They have difficult work ahead of them, and appealing to his sensitivity regarding romantic entanglements is a good way to keep herself there. She’s already observed the soft eyes Steve has given Bruce when he’s caught them talking together. The lie is on her tongue, ready to sound like the truth.

What comes out of her mouth is quite different.

“Initially I’d designated Banner as a mark to secure a new cover for myself after SHIELD went bust. He was as good an option as I had: an in at Stark Industries, just boring enough to keep me out of the media radar, and – if I took it far enough – a failsafe against extradition in case the hearings went tits up.”

Natasha cringes at herself internally.

_What._

“If you took it –” Steve balks. “Natasha, he’s our teammate. And our _friend_ , how could you –”

“ _Don’t_ give me that shit,” she says. “You’d drop Stark in five seconds flat if he said anything against Barnes, and everyone knows it. Don’t act like you’re above prioritizing your own motives, and I won’t either.”

That shuts him up; Natasha can see the tick in his jaw where he’s gritting his teeth against a retort that’ll wind both of them up further. The thing of it is, she didn’t mean to say that either. What is wrong with her?

She clamps her mouth shut, firmly biting down on the insides of her cheeks and concentrating on her breathing. Is it Loki? Is it some long-dormant failsafe implanted in her by the Red Room? Her own brain, scraped clean and rewired too many times, finally giving up the ghost? She does not panic. But it’s a close thing.

When he’s calmed himself too (no small feat, and she appreciates it fully), he speaks again. “You said ‘initially’. So what happened?”

Fuck. _No._ She doesn’t want to answer, or say anything else. But the words come out like vomit; she can’t help but answer.

“You wanna hear I finally grew a conscience?” she bites out. But instead of firing him up, Steve suddenly looks incredibly ashamed.

“I know you have a conscience Natasha,” he says. “That’s why I’m so angry. The thing of it is – Bruce doesn’t deserve to be manipulated like that.”  

“I know that,” she says. “Of all people, believe me. I know.”

“So why’d you do it?”

“Because if it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else. And a known evil is better than an unknown one.”

“Natasha –”

“Don’t. Steve, I know my place in the world. I’ve made my peace with it. If it costs us Bruce now, then maybe that’s for the best.” She looks out the window where the horizon is completing its darkening into an inky night. It looks very red, like a fire burning at the edge of the world. She feels unsettled. “He hates this life anyway. You don’t need to be a spy to know that. Not everyone chose the fight like you did.”

“Jesus, Natasha.” Steve looks a little shocked. _Good,_ she thinks viciously, then hates herself for it. She grits her teeth.

Steve is quiet after that. It’s not an easy quiet though, and she can feel every minute of silence between them. There’s something complicated going on inside her; not only confusion at her apparent inability to lie, but a weight like sadness. Desperation. Like she’s being backed into a corner by a foe she cannot see.

\---

Guilt has never sat easy on her shoulders. It’s a weakness, easy to exploit. She’s aware of this; when she’d confronted Loki, not all of the shame she’d shown him about her past was faked. But he’d needed to grasp onto something real so she could pull the truth out of him. It was a dangerous play, akin to running a sword through your own body in order to impale the enemy at your back.

Nick hated when she’d use that particular gambit. Probably still does, but he doesn’t really have a foothold in the argument against self-sacrifice anymore.

Whatever Wanda had done inside her head was much different than whatever Loki had done. She hadn’t emptied them and poured something else in. No, she’d taken what was already inside and distorted it out of all proportion. The lock’s been picked, the the forbidden box forced open and all its demons spilled out. The only difference in this story is that there isn’t any hope hiding in the bottom to find.

\---

She can’t lie. Even something as simple as saying the wrong time of day while looking at the clock; the words die in her throat. She tries typing them, or writing them down – her fingers lock up, or her mind goes completely blank.

She knew when she saw Wanda’s pain that she should have considered leaving, and now she knows for sure she can’t stay. Besides, one wrong question from the right person and she’d be back at zero, or worse. So having been stripped of the first thing she does best, she does the second: she disappears.

Natasha isn’t sure exactly why she decides to go where she does in the state she’s in. It certainly is the last place anyone would expect her to go. But that’s not why, and she knows it: she can’t even lie to herself. She wants to explain, more than anything. At least be able to say her piece before letting him decide to hate her. She’s always had a compulsion toward penance. It’s her life; has been since Clint pulled her out, since Nick sat across from her on that ratty old couch in Clint’s old Bed-Stuy flophouse and sized her up with his keen eye, gave her one last chance.

Natasha smiles ruefully at herself as she shoulders her bag and slips out of the Facility into the chilly, clear air of a Pocono night. She could probably set a record by now for the amount of one-last-chances a person can get. There’s another lie she can’t tell herself any more – this really may be the end, and she has to believe it. Fortunately, she’s always been brutally honest with herself regarding consequences.

\---

This time when she dreams it’s of Bruce, standing across the room from her. He is asking _How much of it was a lie?_

The prevarication won’t even form, a silver-tongued response doesn’t even enter her mind. It’s all a wellspring, a geyser that can’t be avoided or contained, only waited out.

 _Everything,_ she says. _All of it._

She wakes with a gasp in the back of a mostly-empty Greyhound bus, the green fist around her throat nothing more than her imagination.

\---

Bruce’s apartment is in an unexpectedly hip part of Brooklyn. She gets the impression that he’s not trying very hard to hide, per se, just be quiet and keep to himself. It was a very good attempt at hiding in plain sight – leased under an alias, paid for through one of Tony’s decoy companies.

Speaking of the devil, she can see the ungainly jut of Stark Tower as the train makes it over the bridge. Bruce’s building is only three blocks from the stop, above a vegan bakery. She has a moment imagining Bruce and his battered laptop at one of the tiny mismatched tables, smiling at the girl with the undercut and large septum piercing as she brings him another cup of fair-trade coffee. He probably knows everyone by name – and they probably don’t know his, and that’s the way he likes it.

She rings the bell and waits. No answer.

She considers leaving.

Instead, she picks the lock and climbs the narrow staircase to the top, then picks her way into his apartment too.

It’s big for a place in this part of Brooklyn, which is still relatively small. (She supposes Stark wasn’t stubborn enough to make him stay at the Tower, but enough to keep him on the payroll. It’s small, true, but it’s a prime spot.) Almost a studio, if not for the small bedroom standing separate from the open-plan living room. The kitchen takes up the corner by the door, and is divided by a built-in breakfast bar. There are lots of windows, and the place is decorated in a mismatched but cohesive fashion.

She walks slowly around the perimeter. Jewel-bright patterns on pillows and drapes remind her of Kolkata, where they first came face-to-face. She’d call it when they first met, but she isn’t sure she’s let him know enough of herself yet for him to say he really knows her. Bruce seems like kind of a stickler for those details. The whole south wall is bookshelves, stuffed with volumes, some overflowing onto the large wooden desk to one side. A Stark-made computer sits idle there, its glass screen dancing with tiny pinpoints of blue-green light in random concentric patterns.  All the rest of the furniture is a balance between the softness of shabby chic and the sculptural style of mid-century design. There’s a tiny bevy of plants in different sized pots lined up on the largest windowsill. One of them is obviously a marijuana plant, but too small to be of any illicit use. She’d bet her hair it was Tony’s cheeky idea of a housewarming gift, or a way to sneak in the computer as an aside. Tony was strange like that. _Here take this gag gift, and also a state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind machine I built with my own two hands, no big deal._

(She remembers him opening Rhodey’s gift a few days after the debacle at his birthday party. She’d thought it would have been something expensive, or something important, or sentimental at the very least. But it was just a coffee mug, the kind you could pick up at any novelty store, with a cartoonish picture of a cat on it and a caption that said _I don’t have a problem with caffeine, I have a problem without it!_

“I don’t even fucking like cats,” she remembers him saying forlornly. But damn if he didn’t use that mug every day for the rest of the time she was monitoring him.)

That’s the kind of people Bruce deserves to be around. The ones who are obvious and consistent in the ways they care for him, even if those ways are strange to outsiders.

She takes a seat at the breakfast bar and waits.

Soon enough she hears the lock unlatch, and Bruce comes in. He sees her and ceases all movement except for dropping his shoulders.

“I know it probably says a lot of unhealthy things about my life that I’m not surprised right now,” says Bruce. Natasha stands up, faces him with her hands hanging non-threateningly at her sides. Bruce sighs at her and turns to hang his bag on a hook in the tiny hallway between the door and the rest of the apartment. “Why are you here?”

She opens her mouth, but where a response would be ready any other time there’s only air and nothingness. Her mind blanks.

“I don’t know,” she manages.

Bruce frowns. It makes him look old, she thinks. The idle thought is loud inside her emptied head.

“Then I’d really appreciate it if you leave.”

“I can’t,” she says. “There’s – I have a reason to be here. I just –”

“Yeah, can’t tell me. Spy shit. Whatever.” He sighs deeply and shrugs out of his jacket, hangs it next to his bag.

“It’s not that,” she says. “I’m here for personal reasons.”

It sounds true. It must be; she said it.

Bruce rubs his eyes beneath his glasses. Then he comes toward her, standing with the bar between them. It’s a weird echo of that night at Tony’s, before everything went to shit.

“I’m only going to ask you this once, and I want you to tell me the truth.”

Natasha shrugs, smiles defeatedly. “I can’t lie,” she says.

Bruce snorts. “Right.” He leans on the bar, and hangs his head between his shoulders for a moment before he looks up, straight into her eyes. It’s the closest they’ve been in months, since she had waited in that cage to push him into the pit, deliberately turn him into the thing he most hated, all for her own ends.

“How much of it was a lie?” he asks.

Natasha’s heart stutters.

“All of it,” she says. “Everything.”

Bruce stares at her for a moment, then nods. His lips go very thin.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah.” He steps back. “Well, I’m going to go about trying to balance out what’s left of my life. You can stay or go or whatever. I don’t care. Just – I don’t really want to talk to you or look at you right now, because it’s making me feel a little green. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Natasha says flatly. She strides over to the window and yanks it open, jumps out onto the fire escape.

“Nat –”

“I get it,” she says, and before he can say anything else (or have to look at her any longer) she scales the chipping iron bars to the roof.

\---

This was a stupid idea, she concedes, looking out over the layers of windows and rooftops that she can see from the top of Bruce’s building. A girl with dyed-grey hair is cooking something in a pan in one window; on a rooftop across the street two boys are making out with borderline violence, pulling at each other’s jackets as they push up against the casement ledge. An old man on a small balcony diagonally below hocks a wad of spit over the railing, continues smoking his cigarillo.

Natasha grimaces, takes another drink from her flask. It’s been almost six hours. She’s fairly sure he knows she hasn’t left yet, but he hasn’t made any move to come speak to her. She should chalk it up as done, just leave already. He obviously doesn’t want her here.

And yet here she still is.

“Thought you left,” Bruce says.

The door clangs shut behind her. She doesn’t turn. She wants to say _I tried,_ but she can’t, because it’s not true.

“Nice view, huh?”

“Oh, now we can talk?” Natasha asks. Sarcasm still works, thank god.

“You really wanna poke the bear in the middle of an overcrowded neighborhood?” Bruce says blithely.

Natasha rolls her eyes. “So during a robot apocalypse I had to push you into a pit to get him to come out and play, but right now all I have to do is lay the sass on a little thick. Good to know.”

She takes a swig from the flask and revels in the familiar burn as the alcohol wends its way down into her gut.

“Yeah, about that,” Bruce says, and there is honest-to-god a green flash that goes through his eyes. “Did you really have to spend a year pretending to be interested in me romantically in order to do that? I mean I know you’re good at the puppet act but I’m really not.”

Okay, _now_ they’re talking about it. Fine.

“I needed a cover,” Natasha says, casually. “You were easy. And for all intents and purposes – which were my own, actually, not Fury’s as you seem to think – it worked.”

She’s been spending too much time with Steve. His superior orneriness has obviously rubbed off on her, but with no righteous anger and rock-founded morals to butt up against her compulsive honesty, all she’s left with is a mean bitterness.

The drinking is probably not helping.

“And you’re fine with that,” he says. “Wasting a year of your life on cultivating a pack of lies just so you have an alibi when the next shadow organization comes knocking.”

“Who are you, Sam now?”

“Natasha –”

“Is that really what you wanted?” she asks, pinning him with a narrow-eyed look. “You know what I am. You’re not an idiot. You really believed I’d be able to change so easily, run away with you and play house somewhere off the grid?”

“Stranger things have happened,” he says, and it’s infuriating to her how good he is at keeping himself calm. She knows why he is, obviously, but it’s still unnerving because she knows he’s still angry even though he doesn’t sound like it. “Look at Clint. Is there something so wrong with wanting that?”

“Clint’s living on Laura’s borrowed time,” she says, looking away. “He’s not lucky. He’s just got good aim.”

Natasha shrugs in punctuation; Bruce sighs heavily at her. She can see him come up to the railing in her peripheral vision. She takes another slug and drains the flask. She’s not even drunk; what a waste.

“Sometimes I think about what it might have been like if this never happened to me,” Bruce says. “I had a good, stable life. I had a tenure track position at the University. I had Betty. I had my work.”

He takes off his glasses, fiddles with one of the arms.

“Do you ever wonder who you’d be if all of it never happened to you?” he asks her.

“I can’t,” she says, softer but not quite kindly. “There is no before for me.”

She looks at him.

“You want to know the real difference between you and me, Bruce? It has nothing to do with searching for truth or dealing in lies. It’s the simple fact that I am the monster because I have to be. Killing is easy for me because if it isn’t, I die. The only true north in my life can be boiled down to one word: survive. I want to live more than I care about anything or anyone else. At first it was because I feared a punishment worse than death. Now it’s because I have a debt to pay, and I’m gonna be in the red for the rest of my life, however long it ends up being. You’d do anything to get rid of the monster in you. Me? I’d do anything I can to sharpen its teeth.”

Natasha’s heart is beating hard, and her hands are trembling a little. She realizes that she’s taken a few steps forward as she spoke, and in turn Bruce has retreated backwards. He’s crowded up against the corner of the roof railing, his glasses clutched in one hand.

“You really are telling the truth,” Bruce says. His eyes are wide and shiny.

“It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it,” she says.

With that, she turns and stalks back toward the stairwell door, descending down the darkened flight and out of the building, leaving Bruce alone with the warm, stagnant night air.

 

\---

_She is nineteen, standing in a training room, empty except for a black mat and Nick Fury and herself, standing at attention. There are shiny spots on the laminated canvas, her blood and his. He is a formidable teacher but she thinks he is weak in a way that leaves him dangerously vulnerable._

_“If you take away every weapon,” the one-eyed man says. “What are you left with?”_

_“I have my teeth, my nails,” she says in Russian, just to be obstinate. “I have my mind and my cleverness, and my fists.”_

_“No,” he says. “What do you become?”_

_She quirks an eyebrow. She does not understand, but she will not say as much._

_“Natasha.”_

_“Sir.”_

_“What are you without a weapon?” he asks again._

_Natasha’s heart is beating hard, and not just from the exertion. She gets the feeling that it is important she does not get this question wrong, but she only has one answer._

_“I am nothing, sir.”_

_Fury bares his teeth, as if she’s caused him pain. “I was afraid you’d say that.”_

_He steps close to her. She tenses, wondering if he is going to engage her again. But he just stands and looks down at her for a long moment, then extends his open palm toward her. She looks from the intensity of his face to his calloused fingers. Just moments ago, those fingers had curled into a fist whose force had sent her to the ground._

_“Listen to me,” he says. “You are not just what you do. You are not only what you are capable of doing. You need to believe me when I tell you I will never lie to you, unless I mean to save your life. When the fight is over, you are not the Black Widow, or the Red Death, or a daughter of the Red Room, or any of those things. You are Natasha Romanoff, and that means something in and of itself.”_

_She is still staring at his hand, wondering what he means by its posture._

_“Will the fight ever be over, though,” she asks. Her voice is flat. It’s not a question she’s sure she ever wants an answer to._

_“It will be when you decide it is.”_

_Something hot twists inside her stomach, makes her throat seize up._

_His fingers reach out again, his palm open to her._

_She bypasses it completely, and instead throws her arm around his middle, clutching herself tight to him, letting out the sob that has welled up inside her. He holds her just as tight, the embrace almost as brutal as any of their submission holds. She can’t remember the last time anyone held her, treated her with reverence. It makes her sob harder, and Nick doesn’t seem to care. She knows he will not call her weak for this, knows it like she hasn’t been sure of anything in a very long time. Possibly ever._

_She is safe here._

_No one can take this away from her, and even God will not be able to help anyone who tries._

\---

Bruce is facedown on the couch when she gets back in. She decided against more vodka, bringing home a six-pack of some artisan microbrewery bullshit (as a sideways apology for Bruce) and a box of cookies for herself instead, effectively replacing one gluttonous vice with another. She stands in the kitchen, listening for his breathing.

“I’m awake,” he says, albeit groggily. “Save you the trouble of being a creep.”

“How did I never notice you were this much of an asshole?”

“I conveniently positioned myself next to Tony Stark at every opportunity,” Bruce answers. “He’s like a black hole when it comes to tact.”

They’re quiet for a few long minutes. Natasha puts the beer in the fridge and sits down at the table with the cookies. She spends a while looking at them in the dim light, deciding which one she wants to eat. She is decidedly not still listening to the way Bruce is breathing, the sound of his clothes rustling as he shifts slightly on the cushions.

“Didn’t think you were gonna come back,” he says.

“You keep saying that,” she says. “Don’t really have anywhere else I can be right now, so. When I’m leaving for good, I’ll tell you.”

“Listen,” he says, and his voice is still soft and sleepy, his face obscured in shadow. “I shouldn’t’ve pushed before. I didn’t realize you were telling the truth, that you couldn’t help but do so, and that’s unfair. I won’t ask any more questions as long as you’re here.”

Natasha shakes her head, even though she isn’t quite sure he can see it from where he is.

“No, it’s okay,” she says. “I think that’s why I’m here in the first place. I owe you the truth.”

She chooses a plain butter cookie, but doesn’t go to eat it just yet.

“Do you really think of yourself as a monster?” Bruce asks.

“Yeah,” she says. “But for me it’s not a negative, is what I guess I was trying to say.” She shifts a little, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “You really think if the Green Guy had never shown up, you’d be happy with a pension and a wife and 2.5 brats?”

“Honestly?”

“That does seem to be the theme we keep coming back to.”

Bruce chuckles. It’s a warm, gravelly sound she’s never heard him make. “Honestly: no. I was an asshole.”

The laugh that comes out of Natasha catches her off guard.

“Really.”

“Yeah.” She hears Bruce shift a little on the couch, so that he’s lying on his side now. She still doesn’t want to face him completely; she keeps her head down in the box of cookies. It’s so much easier to talk in the dark; she feels like if she faces him she’ll break this tentative truce they’ve grown.

“Steve told me once about the serum he got, Erskine’s original formula. He said Erskine had told him it works in an amplificatory way, which is to say it takes what’s already there and builds outward. If you’re good, it makes you great.”

“Like Steve,” Natasha says, kind of absently.

“Like Steve,” Bruce agrees. “And if you’re already a selfish dick with a chip on his shoulder who thinks the world owes him notoriety for advances in obscure science, so obsessed with his job that he can’t even schedule in time to fuck his girlfriend, let alone propose – well.”

“Well,” Natasha says. She wasn’t expecting all that, but hey. She’ll take it.

“Yeah. I guess when you spend most of your time trying to keep your anger in check you really get a chance to examine where it all comes from. I started out with issues. If I was never in the accident and subsequently forced to face it, I’d still be buried under it without even enough light to see how far up my own ass I was.”

“To be fair you still are up your own ass a lot of the time.”

“Someone’s gotta be. I mean, I do have Tony for that…”

That gets another laugh out of Natasha, before she plugs it up with her cookie.

“Weird,” Bruce says.

Natasha swallows her mouthful of cookie. “What?”

“You laughing,” Bruce says. It sounds like he’s slipping back to sleep again – or finally; she couldn’t really tell if he was sleeping before or only trying to.

“What’s weird about my laugh?” she asks, suddenly curious.

“Nothing. It’s just – I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before. It sounds so...normal.”

“What the fuck did you think it’d sound like, Banner?”

“Iunno,” he says, and it’s all she gets out of him.

She eats one more cookie before closing the box. Once she’s sure Bruce is completely asleep, she gets up and throws a blanket over him, then retreats into his room. She sleeps on top of the covers in her clothes, because she still feels like it’s a violation to be anywhere in his space, let alone in his bed.

She doesn’t belong here, and Bruce’s kindness has only thrown that into full relief.

\---

“Hey,” Bruce says from the doorway. Natasha looks up at him from where her face is hidden half-squished in her arm. “I just wanna get some clothes. I’ll leave you alone.”

She goes to sit up. “I’ll get out.”

“No, no. It’s fine.” He shuffles to the chest of drawers and starts rooting around. When he turns back around, she hasn’t gotten any closer to standing.

“You feeling okay?” he asks, eyeballing her.

“No. I don’t feel well at all, actually.” She pauses. “Shit.”

Bruce’s mouth tilts up at one corner.  “Still truthing?”

Natasha groans. She flops back down and curls herself into a ball at the foot of Bruce’s now-rumpled bed. “Didn’t even get drunk, got the hangover anyway. Bullshit.”

“You wanna use the bathroom before I get in there?”

“Yeah, I need to –” Natasha clamps her mouth shut deliberately. Bruce’s eyes are sparkling in an awful, mischievous way.

“Sorry,” he says. “I never realized until now how much of being a good houseguest is predicated on lying.”

“All politesse is a series of agreed-upon un-truths.”

“Well, luckily,” Bruce says, shifting the bundle of soft cotton in his arms, “I don’t care if you’re a rude houseguest. Friends are allowed to be bad houseguests. That’s how you can tell they’re your friends.”

“You’re too nice for your own good,” she says.

“That’s truer than you think,” he answers. Then he nods toward the door. “Go. Towels are in the cabinet above the toilet.”

Natasha heaves herself up, shuffles over to the door, but pauses.

“Friends,” she says.

“Uh huh.” Bruce sets his clothes down on the dresser and goes to re-straighten the bedspread. She leaves him to it. He doesn’t say anything about it.

\---

“Tony’s got you sequestered,” Natasha says.

“Yeah.” Bruce doesn’t sound happy about it. “Keeping me hidden away in Brooklyn like another bauble in his jealous horde.”

“You’d leave if you wanted.”

Bruce sighs. “I guess. Running’s getting harder though.” He drops some more things into the pan; it sizzles. The smell is heavenly, and Natasha’s stomach tightens and churns with hunger when she remembers that all she’s eaten in the past day and a half was a single butter cookie. (And, you know. All that vodka.)

Natasha tries not to inhale her food, but she has most of her plate gone by the time Bruce finishes his and sits down. He knocks an extra lump of hash browns onto her plate from his own without a word, and Natasha is so grateful.

“Your necklace,” Bruce says after a while. Natasha touches the little silver arrow at her throat. “Never seen you wear jewelry before. Is that – sorry.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Just ask, Bruce.”

“Is it for who I think it’s for?”

“Yeah.” Natasha fiddles with it for a moment. “I was pretty young when Clint pulled me out. I thought I might have been in love with him for a moment there –”

Bruce’s eyebrows arch in surprise. If Natasha were a blushing woman, she’d be blushing right now.

“– that’s a secret,” she continues smoothly.

“Acknowledged,” Bruce says, not without a twist to his lips.

“But it was Laura who gave it to me a long time ago.”

Bruce’s brow quirks again. “Laura?”

Natasha nods.  

“I stayed with them for a while before Nick offered me a place at SHIELD. Laura told me it was a reminder that I would always point myself in the right direction.” She grins down at what’s left of her toast. “So corny.”

“I think it’s sweet,” Bruce says. “Betty had a necklace that was special to her too. Her mother’s. She – she pawned it when I was on the run, just to buy me clothes and supplies so I could get off the grid.” Bruce pokes at an errant piece of onion with his fork. “Got it back to her eventually. But, you know.”

“Do you miss her?” Natasha asks.

“Yes,” Bruce says. “But then I think about how much happier and safer she is without me around, without being mixed up in all this, and I feel a lot better. I mean, you know what happened to Pepper, and that’s just Tony’s fucking business rivals.”

“No one connected to us is ever safe,” she says.

“But I mean – that’s the point, right? That’s why we are, why we do what we do.”

Natasha looks up at him, her eyes wide. “That’s awfully optimistic, coming from you.”

Bruce just shrugs and smiles crookedly and takes her empty plate. “Well, you know. _Al-ways look on the bright si-ide of life, doo-do do, da doo-de do de-do._ ”

Natasha laughs again as Bruce bounces their plates over to the sink in time with his stupid song. “What’s that from?”

He turns and looks genuinely affronted. “Oh, no way.”

And that’s how Natasha learns what Monty Python is, and how they spend the rest of the morning watching _Life of Brian_. They sit on opposite sides of the couch, and though Natasha has never really grasped much about British humor (she had a hard enough time with American – Russians are very serious people), she thoroughly enjoys watching and listening to Bruce laugh and say multiple times, “Oh, this is the best part.”

When Bruce asks her later if she enjoyed it, she has no trouble saying yes, even though she couldn’t care less about the movie itself.

\---

In the afternoon, Bruce gravitates to his computer and begins tapping and flicking things around the interface. She considers going out; considers going back up to the roof to do some calisthenics. In the end she doesn’t do any of it. Instead, she peruses his bookshelf for something to read.

“This place is pretty well-appointed for someone who’s been here less than a week,” she observes.

Bruce sits back and stretches out his shoulders. He has very poor posture when he’s typing, Natasha notices. Poor posture all around, in fact, now that she thinks of it – he hunches in on himself like he’s constantly afraid of being jostled by accident into a giant green oblivion.

“Tony’s had this place for me since last year,” he says. “Pepper’s been slowly filling it with books and furniture. The Tower’s all well and good, but – well, you’ve lived with him. It’s a circus sometimes.”

“Most of the time,” Natasha agrees.

“I have to get away from it. But you know, not too far.”

Natasha chooses a red canvas tome that has _Classical Mythology_ embossed on the side. “Do I detect a note of bitterness, Doctor?”

Bruce turns and makes a face at her; it’s somewhere between frustrated and contrite. It makes his nose flare and his lips flat, and Natasha thinks it’s the most amusing thing she’s seen since his dancing that morning.

“I had a thought on that plane, you know,” Bruce says, and turns away. His tone has gone from facetious to grim. Natasha sobers immediately. “Clear like nothing else is when I’m the Other Guy. I thought, I don’t want to be contained anymore.” He scratches at the scruffy base of his skull. “It was possibly the most frightening thought I’d ever had. To just – stay that way. I was green for longer than I’d ever been in that forest. And I was fine with that, living like an irredeemable... _animal._ ” He sounds as if he’s making some shameful confession. In some way, she supposes he is.

“Tony is always trying to convince me that it’s a gift,” he continues. “That it’s an asset, that it saved my life, helped me save other lives. But all the cities he’s ever leveled are in the past. I don’t know how many more are in my future, and it _eats_ at me. I do try to be optimistic but...I’m like a grenade with the pin halfway out all the time. You can’t blame me for wanting it to just explode and be over and done with already.”

“I suppose I can’t,” she says.

His back tenses in surprise before he leans his head in his hand over the desk. Perhaps he didn’t think she’d agree with him, but oh, has she been there. She lets the silence stretch, thumbs the edge of the yellowed pages, lets the smell of old paper and binding glue ground her.

“Wanda did this to me,” she says, settling on the couch behind him.

“I figured as much,” he says.

“She was trying to fix it, though. Fix what she’d done. Maybe she can help you too.” Bruce swivels around completely to face her.

“Unless she can replace my mutated blood with her magic red light, I’m sure she can’t.”

“Then maybe it stands to reason you don’t need fixing.”

Bruce laughs, hollow and short, but then she sees him visibly pause.

“That’s a true thing, is it?”

“As far as I know,” she says. “And I know a little bit about feeling like a prisoner in your own body.”

Bruce’s shoulders slump even further, if possible. “I never thought of you of all people as trapped.”

Of course not. She works hard to make it seem like she makes every choice she’s dealt. It’s never been that easy, or that simple. “Well, I never thought of you as an irredeemable animal, so.”

He looks away from her to the stack of folders at the edge of his workspace. “So at the very least a redeemable one, then?” He casts his eyes sideways, like he thinks he’s being all innocent and clueless.

“I can’t tell you you’re awful, even though I want to,” Natasha says, clamping down on a grin. “Just take the fucking compliment from me while you can, Bruce.”

He doesn’t say anymore, just goes back to his work.

She gets five pages through a random chapter of the mythology book before she can’t stand it anymore.

“God, just stand up and come over here,” she says, casting the book aside and getting to her feet. “My back hurts just looking at you.”

“What?” Bruce says.

“You have terrible posture. Come here,” she says, and stands in the open space between the coffee table and the television.

Bruce comes and stands in front of her obediently, albeit with a shrug.

And that’s how she spends the rest of the afternoon teaching him the eleven principal ballet body positions, and a few yoga poses for good measure.

 

\---

“Don’t sleep on the couch again tonight,” she says when bedtime comes around. “It’s bad enough I’m here without your permission. Let me take the couch.”

“We could both –” Bruce says, then stops, shakes his head shortly. “No. Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest –”

Natasha takes pity on him. “I know. It’s fine.”

Bruce looks at her, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. The silence stretches a beat too long and Natasha tries not to make her mouth twitch upward.

“So does that mean you –”

“Yes, Bruce. It’s fine. Come on.” And she walks past him into the bedroom.

They face opposite ways to undress, like children. Natasha strips down to her underwear and camisole, and slips into Bruce’s bed. This is nothing like how they shared the bed at Clint’s. She’d touched him, then, and let him touch her. But neither of them seem to want anything to do with the other’s body just now, and Bruce is just as far away from her on the bed as she is from him.

He plugs in his phone and turns off the lamp, and lets the darkness settle before he speaks again.

“So um. Were you sleeping in your clothes because of, like, spy-readiness-protocols or something?”

Natasha smiles, glad for the dark. “No. I just – I felt like enough of an interloper. I didn’t want to just help myself to your bed, but I knew if I didn’t at least use it, you’d feel bad. So.” She shrugs against the mattress. “It doesn’t make much sense when I say it out loud. In fact it sounds pathetic.”

“A little,” Bruce agrees.

Natasha knees him in the thigh.

“Aow!” he yelps, curling away from her. “Jeez. You weren’t like this at the farm.”

The silence suddenly feels louder, then.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says. “I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“It’s okay,” Natasha says. “I’ve had worse missions, you know.”

“It just – you’re really good at what you do, Natasha.” Bruce shifts onto his side, Natasha can feel him looking at her across the bed, through the darkness. She keeps her eyes on the ceiling, the covers pulled up to her chin. “I know you said I’m not that stupid but for a little while there, I kinda was.”  

“I’m sorry, too,” she says. “I knew it was an awful thing to do, but I did it anyway. I guess I’ve spent so long doing what I have to to survive that I can’t even make myself care how a friend would feel versus an enemy.”

“Don’t – don’t say that. You care. Wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

Natasha stares up at the ceiling.

“You deserve more than just surviving,” Bruce says. His voice is soft in the dark, but it bruises her nonetheless.

Natasha turns toward him on the bed. She lets her eyes trace the silhouette of his face, his sprawl of curls, the shine of his eyes, the angles of his fingers on the pillow. She had hardly looked at him back at the farm. Hadn’t _absorbed_ any of him. Was it because she was afraid of what she might see in his eyes, or what she would feel behind her own?

“I was ready to die,” Natasha says. “In that city, for the first time I almost felt like I’d come close to breaking even.”

“Natasha, life isn’t about paying your debts,” says Bruce.

“Then what is it about?” she says, and it’s the most honest question she can remember asking in recent memory. The shame of it sticks in her throat. “ _My_ life. It has to be about that, because then where would I fit? What use is the monster without something to fight?” She swallows hard. “You of all people should understand that.”

“Jesus,” says Bruce after a short but pronounced silence. “You sure ain’t telling me exactly what I wanna hear now, are you?”

That pulls a small, humorless laugh from her.

It’s easy for him, she thinks. He doesn’t have to search for penance because when he becomes the monster it’s not his fault. The only absolution Natasha could ever hope for is to say she did her killing under orders. That used to work, but since the truth came out about SHIELD, she can’t even hide under Nick’s voluminous coat tails anymore. Not to mention what Steve would think about that as an answer. It makes her taste bile on her tongue; this trick of Wanda’s is giving her stone conscience a beating.

“You know,” comes Bruce’s voice. “When I was working in Tony’s lab last year I created three new ways of delivering vaccines without needles. I helped pioneer a neurological interface for permanent prosthetics. I mapped an AI that became a _person_. But you know what I remember about it? The high point of that year? Not any of that.”

“What, then?” she asks.

“It’s this Vietnamese sandwich place I found near NYU,” he says, and Natasha actually laughs aloud.

“Are you serious?” she says. “I mean, I know _you_ can lie but you don’t have to rub it in, Banner.”

Bruce holds up his hand palm out, and the other he lays across his heart. “Swear. They have a vegetable bahn-mi kinda one that is absolutely incredible.”

“Stop,” she says, but only means it a little.

“Sandwiches are important,” Bruce says. “I know people always say all that dreck about ‘living for the little things in life’, but you know, sometimes there really is a point to it.”

“Platitudes are platitudes for a reason,” she concedes.

“Mm.” His voice is getting sleepy-sounding. Natasha never noticed how fast this man can go from wide awake to dead asleep. It’s kind of amusing. “We should go tomorrow.”

Natasha grins. “Okay, Bruce.”

“‘m serious,” he says, his nose drooping toward the pillow.

She waits until his breathing deepens before she says, “So am I.”

\---

Natasha sleeps. She doesn’t dream.

When she wakes up, she and Bruce are only touching where their hands rest in between them on the mattress. She spends a clandestine moment letting herself feel the weight of his palm atop her knuckles. Then she slips out of bed without waking him to get herself ready for the day, and make some toast to repay him for yesterday’s breakfast.

\---

They get the sandwiches for lunch. They eat them while they wander around Washington Square Park. They are very good – Natasha can’t say he lied. On the way home, they detour toward Prospect Park instead of heading back to Bruce’s place.

She’s never spent this much time in Brooklyn. It doesn’t look anything like how Steve describes it sometimes, but she didn’t really expect it to. She likes it, though. It’s a little less hectic than Manhattan, a little more open, a little lower profile, and yet there’s still a deli on every corner where you can duck in and buy ice cream pops and bottles of water when it gets too hot. It suits Bruce, she decides. Or maybe Bruce just adapts well; she remembers thinking Kolkata suited him too.

They flop down on a bench, watch the people stroll by. There’s a whole flock of children playing soccer in the middle of the field, and a wrinkly old woman with a gold bikini on sunbathing, and two girls sitting beneath the shade of a tree lavishing attention on a chocolate Lab. Ordinarily, Natasha would feel like she’s living someone else’s life at a moment like this.

She’s surprised to find she doesn’t feel that way at all, hasn’t since she turned up.

“I used to come here all the time as a kid,” says Bruce. He points a hand across the weaving lanes of the park to an unseen avenue beyond the trees. “My Oma had an apartment on Quincy Street, one of those squatty-looking brownstones with the plastic awnings. She had a nasty old cat that hated me, but I’d stay over for a week every year around Passover, help her with the preparations for dinner. It was nice.” He smiles down at his melty ice cream pop. “Made me feel important, you know? Useful.”

“As you can probably guess, I didn’t have what you’d call a conventional childhood,” Natasha says. “But Nick insisted I have a few – non-combat-oriented experiences when I first started training under him.” She pauses to slurp at a drip making its way down her thumb, pretends not to notice Bruce watching her lick her own wrist. “He took me to New Jersey, one of the boardwalks. You know, they have like, the stupid t-shirts and the painted shells and the candy shops. He bought me an ice cream cone. And then he bought himself one because I didn’t know how to eat it, so he taught me.”

Bruce almost falls off the bench laughing. His face is bright red and the last bump of his ice cream is sliding precariously off the end of the stick. He’s such a dork. But she finds herself laughing at him, laughing at her.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says after a while, still giggling. “I’m trying to picture Nick Fury and a dour teenager eating ice cream on a boardwalk. And it’s –”

“It looked exactly how you’re picturing it,” Natasha assures him.

“I mean, I’d say you were lying, but.” He wipes at his eyes, adjusts his glasses.

“My hand to Wanda Maximoff,” Natasha says. She crunches down on the last of her ice cream bar, licks the stick clean, picks off the last of the chocolate shell with her teeth. “It’s one of the first memories I can remember being completely happy. Well. Maybe not happy, per se, but. Something more subdued than that.”

“Content,” Bruce suggests.

“Yeah,” Natasha says. “Safe.” She looks out across the park. Girls and boys walking together, skin of all kinds and colors bared to the hot summer sun, the dappled shade on the paths beneath the trees. “It really hurt me when he lied,” she hears herself say.

“Oh,” Bruce says, and he sounds kind of surprised. “I’d have thought he. Well, at least would have told you.”

“Yeah,” she says. “So did I.”

“I’m sorry,” says Bruce, and he really sounds like he is. “That must’ve been hard for you. I mean, when I lost my dad it was really tough, and we weren’t even as close as – well. As you seemed to be. With Nick.”

Natasha is quiet for a while.

“From a certain angle, I guess, it shows how much you mean to him. That he’d go so far

as to fool even you, just to keep you safe. But I do admit, it’s a pretty shitty way to go about showing someone you care.”

Natasha snorts. “Yeah.” She looks at him, dead in the eye. “It is.”

He seems to realize it as soon as she finishes speaking, because he blanches.

“Oh,” he says again. “Well, fuck.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“To be fair,” he says, turning in his seat to face her.  “At that point, I didn’t know you actually cared.”

“Well, now you do.” She snaps the stick in half. “Ask me something.”

“Can you lie again yet?”

Natasha’s eyes are wide; she can almost feel them sparkling. “What is this, some kind of _Labyrinth_ shit? Ask me something for real.”

But it’s too late; he knows. She can tell from the way his brow creases, how his smile goes soft and sad.

“How much of it was a lie?” he asks.

“Much less than I thought before,” she says.

\---

 

The trip home is quiet. They spend most of it in silence, but it’s not tense. It’s contemplative. She looks at Bruce when he’s not looking at her, and can feel him doing the same. When they get back to the apartment, Natasha grabs them both a beer. Silence is always best spent with a drink in hand, anyway. It’s not half bad, she thinks. But it’s still bullshit.

Bruce settles on one of his angular chairs.

“What time is it?” he asks.

Natasha looks out the window at the setting sun.

“Midnight,” she answers, and it rolls off her tongue, easy as breathing.

Bruce’s mouth becomes a thin line and he lifts a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, readjust his glasses there.

“It’s over,” she says.

He nods, but he’s not meeting her eyes. “I knew in the park, I think.” He thumbs at the paper label on his beer bottle. “What do you suppose happened?”

Natasha folds herself down on the couch. “I’m not sure. Maybe whatever it was Wanda did just...expired.”

“Back to the work of professional dishonesty, then,” he says. He doesn’t sound hostile about it though, not even a little. He sounds disappointed. The bubble’s popped, and they’re strangers again, seeing each other in shades of grey instead of black and white.

Natasha realizes that the truth means more than ever now. So she gives it to him.

“You terrify me,” she says. “I thought it was only when you were green, but.” She shakes her head, gets up and looks out the window. Below, the streetlights have just come on, and there is a group of kids in mismatched pastel clothes, big boots and slouchy hats smoking outside the entrance to a bar across the street. She can feel Bruce’s eyes on her, waiting, patient.

“That’s not something I’m used to. I’m accustomed to being the most threatening thing in a room. And most of the time, I am. I thought if I could manipulate you, I could control the way you felt about me, I could get a handle on it. Maybe even get a handle on you. There was a strategy involved. I used you for my own personal motives. But I didn’t count on actually coming to care for you. And I never expected you to care for me.”

He takes a moment to absorb it. “Did it ever occur to you that if you needed a cover, all you had to do was ask?”

“No. Because that would make you complicit in my own moral failings. I don’t want to drag you into this life any deeper than you’ve already been.”

“So leading me on instead, and then deliberately messing with the other guy was your solution to all of that?”

“It worked for as long as I needed it to,” she says, and even to her ears it sounds cold. But that’s nothing new by now. “After that I accepted that there might not be anything to salvage between us. Just another life on my negative list. But there you were, and here you are.” She sighs, and finally looks at him. She doesn’t know what she expected to find – anger, a deeper disappointment maybe. But he’s looking at her the same as before: warmth in his eyes, and maybe a little sadness too, but not for himself.

“The last person to show me this kind of compassion spared my life and made me his family. After what I’ve done, I’d never demand the same of you, or presume that I deserve anything close.”

“But what if I wanted to,” Bruce asks. “I mean. I don’t know what you want, but I know what I want. And it’s not exactly as simple as falling into bed, or running away to a farm to pop out a bunch of kids.”

Natasha tilts her head, quizzical. “What could I possibly give you that wouldn’t eventually be a detriment to you?”

Bruce takes a deep breath, lets it out in a long huff.

“A place in the world,” he says.

Natasha’s whole self goes still, body and breath. Even her heart slows, it seems.

“That’s all I want,” Bruce says, “No subterfuge, no lies. No Fury pulling the strings. No Tony keeping me caged up even when I’m not green. I want to know that I’m staying around because you _want_ me around. And I mean you specifically, but I also mean you as in the team.”

Natasha narrows her eyes. “But mostly me, right?”

Bruce’s ears turn a lovely shade of red. “Yeah. Mostly you.”

“I can’t be with you like that,” she says.

“I’m not asking you to be. I know that ship was long sailed by when I said goodbye to Betty. And I know you have your own reasons not to. It makes sense, our lives are not exactly standard issue. But we’re still human. Mostly. A good 75% of both of us combined is human.” Natasha stifles a laugh, surprised at herself. But it makes Bruce’s eyes light up that much more, so she supposes it’s not that bad. “I’m just saying, you know. Go be a hero. But if and when you want to, you can come back here. All debts forgiven.”

He gets up and comes over to her. He hooks his little finger in hers. It tightens her throat. A child’s promise, delicate and true. “You can have anyone you want, Nat. I know it. And there’s always the abstract of someday, but I’m not gonna level a city if it never happens.”

“I sure hope not.” She tilts her head, lets her grin fade. “What do you want, though?”

“Right now? All I want is a friend.”

She squeezes her finger around his. “I can do that,” she says, and it’s the truth because she wants it to be.

\---

That night they slide into bed again together. This time, however, Natasha shuffles closer to Bruce, lays her head on his shoulder, her hand on his chest. She can feel him tense, his heart beating fast.

“Natasha, are you sure –”

“It’s okay,” she says. “Are you? Do you want me to –”

“No,” he says. “I mean yes. Stay.”

She smiles. “Okay.”

His arm comes up, soft and tentative to wrap around her, settle at her waist. His other hand covers hers on his chest. Eventually his heart slows.

“Just for tonight,” she says.

“Good enough for me,” he says, already mostly asleep.

She might be lying, or he might, but the ease with which they relax and drift off is not something either of them could fabricate – some things can’t be forged. It puts her at ease enough to follow Bruce to sleep.

\---

She decides the next morning that it’s time to leave. She tells Bruce, but after breakfast. He really knows his way around an egg.

Like the gentleman he thinks he is, he insists on walking with her to the train station.

“It’s nice,” he says decisively.

She looks over at him. He’s got his hands in his pockets, and he’s smiling a little. It makes him look young. “What is?”

“Having a fellow monster to confide in,” he says.

She laughs so long and so loud that she draws stares from a group of kids playing on a stoop across the street. They mock her braying from behind the wrought-iron gate, but she pays it no mind. It was genuine, and it came out of her without hesitation. She’s here on this sidewalk in the baked-garbage haze of a Brooklyn morning with Bruce Banner, and they are both monsters, but that’s all right because it’s real. She’s here, and alive, and that’s something in and of itself.

“Now _there’s_ a laugh I never thought I’d hear from you. What do they call that? A guffaw?”

“You’re an awful man,” she tells him, just because she can.

“I know,” he says. “You’re pretty terrible yourself.”

“The company you keep, Doctor Banner,” she says. The train is rolling into the station on the tracks above them. She reaches out, hooks her little finger in his.

“You can always come back,” she tells him.

Bruce shrugs. It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no either. “So can you.”

She smiles. “I’ll keep in touch.”

“I’ll stick around.”

Then she’s letting go, dashing up the stairs, onto the train and in the wind again.

\---

The Facility is only a few hours from Clint and Laura’s, so she decides to go there first. She misses the kids, and she’s sure they can use all the help they can get with Nat Junior. She’s overdue for a check-in, and honestly – of course – she just feels like it’s the right moment to be surrounded by people she cares about. It’s strange, maybe new, this feeling. She’s always subscribed much more to the Nick Fury school of thought that you push away those who you care the most about. Maybe she’s going soft.

Or maybe she’s just tired of lying to herself.

 _In the neighborhood,_ she texts Laura.

 _Cheeseburgers or BBQ Chicken?_ Laura texts back almost immediately.

She replies with five cheeseburger emojis, and guns it down the empty highway.

Natasha takes the long way around, ditching the car a few miles from the house and trekking through the woods. After an hour, she can feel eyes on her. Fifteen more minutes brings her within a mile of the house, and she pauses near the creek. The sun’s still out, but it’s not as hot as it was this afternoon. Clouds have gathered up in the sky, thick and white, but they aren’t threatening rain. She swings her bag down and plants herself on a tall rock.

She waits.

“Come on,” she says conversationally to the trees after another quarter of an hour passes. “I’m hungry, and I wanna get going. Come out and speak your piece, don’t be shy.”

James steps from behind a large, venerable old oak and shuffles out into the clearing. He stares at her a moment, like any animal wandering out in these woods would. But then he approaches, sits at her legs, hiding in the cool grey shadow of the stone she’s perched upon.

“What are you doing all the way out here?” she asks.

“Came to say hi,” he says. The words are too casual in his deadened tone. It unsettles her.

“Why really?”

He’s quiet for a long time. She waits it out; sometimes it takes a while for him to sift through and find what he really wants to say.

“They fucked with you,” says James. “Got in your head again. Wanted to make sure you’re. You still. Got everything.”

She nods, then says, “Yeah. She didn’t take anything away. She just mixed me up.”

“Still not good,” he says.

“No,” she agrees. “Useful, though.”

She looks around at the clearing, listens to the burbling creek. Cooper’s skinned his knees trying to climb this very rock every summer since he was old enough to walk. Lila’s just last year able to reach the top without any help.

“Can I ask you something, James?”

He hums a little affirmative: “Mm.”

“Did you ever want a family? Of your own, I mean. Have a wife, be a father.”

The early evening crickets squeak and croak as James thinks it over.

“Before, maybe. It was expected, if you came home from the war. But. Even then anytime I thought of coming home, I was coming home to Steve. Then I didn’t come home at all, and I hoped he went home to Peg for the both of us.” He shifts, almost soundless on the carpet of leaves and twigs. “I like kids. Little girls remind me of my sisters, makes me feel happy.”

“Would you still want something like that?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing works down there anymore.” He’s quiet for another moment. “I know there’s other ways. But there’s more than one reason for me not to, now.”

“Oh.” She moves her leg slightly; it bumps up against James’s shoulder. It’s warm; he doesn’t move away. “That’s what she made me think of.”

“Graduation.”

“Yeah.”

“You reversed it.”

“I remember now.”

“You want to?”

“Considered it. Taking a pass.”

“Mm.” It’s an approving sound this time.

She knows from the stillness of the air it’s going to be very hot tomorrow, and every day until the heat breaks in a thunderstorm. She isn’t fond of the heat, not really. But she loves the rain, when it comes.

“Can I ask you something?” says James.

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you love him? Banner.”

“No,” she says. Then, “Well. Not like –”

She makes a gesture between them, then from James to the greater world, out in which somewhere is Steve, waiting for him.

“You loved me,” he says.

“I did,” she answers. “But I was just a child then. There’s more to it now.” She bites at her lip. “Do you still want to come home? To Steve, I mean,” she asks. He’s unusually talkative tonight. She might as well sate her curiosity while he’s willing.

She feels the weight on her leg increase, the wisps of his hair against her knee, his breath against her shin.

“He wants you to, you know that.”

“‘M not the same.”

“He knows that. He’s not the same either.” She reaches down, threads her fingers through his hair. Feels him sigh against her leg.

“I miss him.”

“I know you do.” His hair is clean, smells like the lemon-verbena shampoo she keeps in her safehouse. She smiles, glad to know he’s been keeping care of himself, accepting what little hospitality she can offer.

“Family isn’t just kids, you know.”

She hadn’t expected him to say anything else. She gives him a tap on the top of his head, and he looks up at her.

“And what is?” she asks, wanting to know what he’ll say.

His eyes are bright in the cloudy gloom, face leaning out of the shade now into the pale strain of sunlight breaking through the clouds.

“Family is who you take care of,” he says. “And who takes care of you right back. No matter what.”

She can hear Bucky in him then, hear the words echoed through the long hallways of his life, said sweet or angry or full of worry to a tiny, sickly Steve. Whispered, maybe, in Russian to a scared little girl, neither of them understanding where they had come from or where they would eventually go, but knowing that in that piece of time they at least had each other.

“Thank you, James,” she says.

He stays pressed against her leg until the sun has moved a noticeable amount above them. Then he stands and kisses her, soft on her lips, and leaves again through the woods. She picks up her pack and heads in the opposite direction, toward the smell of the barbecue grill and the sound of children’s laughter.

\---

After dinner, Clint is bouncing Little Nat in his baby backpack, dancing around the kitchen unloading the dishwasher so he can load it up again with tonight’s dishes. Cooper and Lila are playing a very intense game of Volcano Robots vs. Space Unicorns out in the front yard that involves a lot of screaming and dramatically falling into a large pile of dried grass.

Laura links her arm with Nat’s, tugs her out of the house and along for a walk. It’s a nice night, and letting the noises of the house and the children and Clint’s awful country music recede into the background in favor of crickets and frogs is pleasing.

“I’m glad you got out here again so soon,” Laura says.

“Yeah, me too,” Natasha sighs. “Lately I’ve been needing vacations from my vacations.”

Laura tilts her a concerned look. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Nat says. “Just. You know. Being honest with yourself isn’t exactly easy, and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, so.”

Laura gives a little nod, kicks a clod of dirt out of their path.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with Bruce, would it?”

Natasha looks at her. Laura always was sharper than anyone gave her credit for.

“Yeah,” Nat says, and the half-truth comes easy. “We decided to stay friends. Not all of us are cut out for the married-with-three-kids kind of life.”

Laura laughs softly. “Could have had four, you know,” she says. Natasha quirks an eyebrow at her.

“Clint and I had only been together a year or two. We were being careful but – you know. Accidents happen, especially with him.”

Natasha smiles. Clint seems like he’s got it together these days, but they’ve both known him long enough to know the truth.

“At the time, I already kind of knew I was ready to marry him, but _Jesus_ I could _not_ have had a kid back then. We were still living in Brooklyn and this was before he told me he was being scouted for SHIELD. Before you. I wanted to go back to school. And he was haring off to God knows where and coming back covered in bruises and bleeding...”

“Not like the responsible man he is now, coming home with high-tech skin grafts and mind-control concussions,” Natasha says. Laura laughs again, easy in the glowing evening sun.

“Point taken. But I know now that if something happened to him, I’m in a place where I could take care of all our little critters, if it ever came to that. I have a support system now. People I love, people I trust. Back then I could barely take care of myself. It wouldn’t have been fair to have a baby back then, no matter how much I wanted to.”

They walk along some more, looping around the big oak tree at the edge of their property, then start heading back toward the house. Deep summer makes the air smell sweet with the scent of dirt and hemp. Natasha can feel the grass through her sandals, tickling at her feet. Laura steps in time with her even though her tread is heavier in her sturdy boots.

“I don’t think I want to,” she says. “I’ve left enough of a legacy in the world.”

Laura looks up at her. She doesn’t look surprised.

“You never seemed to want to. And if it’s anything from me, I think saving the world three or four times is a very good legacy to leave.”

Natasha bumps her shoulder fondly. Sometimes she still feels like it’ll never be enough to atone for all the blood she’s spilled. But it’s hard to feel that way right now. Not when someone you love tells you that you’re good. It’s almost enough to believe.

“I don’t think I ever really considered it until now. Not in a realistic way. I mean, I could. But that would require running and – well. I don’t want to run anymore.” The smile she gives Laura then is not false, but it’s not a joyful kind of smile. She imagines it must look like the smile Steve gets when he talks about James. Or Peggy. There’s happiness in it, true – but the quiet, hard-won kind.

“I have a place in the world,” Natasha says. “It’s here.”

 _Take it,_  a voice inside her head says.  _Take it, then give it back twice as hard._

Laura curls her arm around Natasha and pulls her into her side. Natasha brings her arms up and halts their walking to hug her back for real. (At some point Laura’s feet leave the ground.) The rest of the walk back to the house feels as if Natasha’s shed a weight from around her ankles.

 

Cooper and Lila charge them when they get in sight of the porch, and Natasha lets them tackle her to the ground as Laura admonishes them weakly between laughs.

It’s here, she thinks. Right now. When she was in hiding with Bruce, her place was there, and when she goes back to the Facility it’ll be there too, right between Steve and Sam.

If being compelled to tell the truth has taught her anything, it’s that honesty is always going to be a moving target. And gaining back her ability to lie again has only made her realize that she never felt the need to when she knows she’s safe, and the ones she protects are as well. Lies are a sword you hold in front of you: still necessary, might always be. But the truth can be a shield you gather behind. Laura understands.

Love is a complicated thing, but belonging is easy.

Maybe for Natasha, the dichotomy doesn’t matter so much anymore.

\---

Wanda is waiting for her when she gets back. There is a stretch of timber fence that has long since lost whatever it was demarcating. She’s sitting on it, way out in the field, looking toward the treeline where the sunset is coming through in glowing lines.

“You fixed it,” Natasha says, approaching her.

Wanda turns to face her. Her hair is limned in gold and red; the darkness that cradled her eyes has lessened. She gives Natasha that sharp, considering look.

“No,” she says. “You did.”

“Did you know?” Natasha asks.

Wanda shakes her head. “The Vision saw. I was worried, guilty. I’d seen what they did, didn’t want to do that to you again. Vision said I had nothing to fear, and neither did you.” She stretches a hand in front of her, flexes her fingers. They do not glow. “These things work themselves out.”

“Well,” Nat says, pulling herself up on the fence to sit next to her. “Maybe practice a little with the application.”

“Apologies,” Wanda says, but with the expression of someone who is only sorry in the slightest way. “I am getting better every day,” she says, which does sound a little more contrite.

The shadows bloom and grow, reaching for them. Natasha turns her face to the sun.

“Yeah, me too.”

 

 **  
** \--- end ---


End file.
